FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

If you're not feeling sufficiently irritated by the US/UK warmongering policies, we invite you to click here to read this FAQ while listening to an embedded MIDI file. That oughta get your dander up.

Q: What makes you think you deserve money for doing absolutely nothing?
A: We never said anything about deserving it! However, if the Save Karyn woman can collect $20,000 to pay off her credit card debt, we figured that shameless begging was worth a shot. (Nothing against Karyn, mind you; she seems like a nice, fun person.) It's not like we're requiring you to donate or anything. We would if we could, admittedly, but we can't. So be a pal! A PayPal!

Q: How can you justify actually making money from this war?
A: Hey, Cheney's doin' it. Seriously, though, this isn't about us making money. We desperately need to get away from metro Detroit, and the tangibly uncomfortable war mentality that's gripped our nation. Since our retail salaries don't allow for both vacations and our all-important CD-purchasing sprees, we've come to the realization that the kindness of strangers is the only way we're going to be able to get away and clear our heads.

Q: What happens if you earn more money than you need to get to Toronto?
A: Then, while in Toronto, we shall purchase the grandest hat of all!

Q: Listen, you misguided fuckin' hippies: America blah blah blah love it or leave it blah blah blah the reason you have the freedom to make your stupid pointless website without being arrested or executed blah blah blah Bill O'Reilly says blah blah lies lies lies blah blah blah you'd better support our troops these colors don't run I've got an American flag on my SUV!
A: Sean Hannity, please stop bothering us. Let's make some things clear: Jessi and Chris are not anti-American. We're big fans of the Bill of Rights (that bothersome, frequently misinterpreted Second Amendment aside); we're just not crazy about the fact that our current presidential administration isn't. We're hoping that all the American troops come back alive- even that cop who gave Chris an undeserved "failure to yield" ticket and was then shipped off to Kuwait! The point is that we are anti-violence. We're not going to pull a Chrissie Hynde and say we hope that America loses the war or anything, because that would be stupid. Anyone losing the war just means a big mound of dead people, and that is the idea we're against.

The war itself is the product of a bunch of white guys who paid too much attention in gym class and somehow came away with the idea that there is some sort of glory in conflict; that you're not a Man unless you come to blows with someone else and are then the last one standing. Saddam Hussein is obviously among the most evil men ever to have sex with Satan, but he has made it clear on several occasions that he's concerned enough about retaining his own political power to be open to talks with the United Nations. Yes, the talks went rather slowly, because Hussein is something of a prideful bastard, but the point is they were moving along when Bush declared that his patience had run out with the non-violent route. And we don't think it makes a whole lot of sense to be chompin' at the bit to go to war when diplomacy has resulted in any sort of progress.

Q: Well, how do you explain the fact that we've got a "Coalition of the Willing" backing us in this war, then?
A: The "Coalition of the Willing" is nonsense. For one thing, the simple fact that countries like Turkey and Italy and Spain were willing to commit troops to the United States' "Screw the UN" movement is meaningless when you consider that most of this military action was decided upon against the protests of the vast majority of these countries' citizens. According to public opinion polls, something like 81 percent of Italy and Spain's populace is against this war. In Turkey, that number rises to 94 percent! So the *ahem* "willing" part of that title obviously refers only to the leaders of these other nations (some of whom were strongarmed into cooperation, some of whom were promised aid) and not the people residing therein, which only further proves that all the power is in the hands of an undeserving and unaccountable few. Not to resort to "Bilderberg Group"-esque conspiracy theories or anything, but it would seem that the will of the majority of the world is being discounted in favor of the self-serving will of only a few powerful men, here. All of whom are descended from a race of extraterrestrial lizards. Did we mention that yet?

Q: So you're against the liberation of the Iraqi people, then?
A: Of course not. The Kurds have obviously been through enough in the past couple of decades under Hussein to deserve a little freedom. (As David Rees wrote in Get Your War On, "Once this is over, the Iraqi people better be the freest fucking people on the face of the earth. They better be freer than me. They better be so fucking free they can fly.") It just seems odd to us that the "liberation" of the Iraqi people would call for a post-war plan that the United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, referred to as a humanitarian "disaster," and that also includes the retention of many higher-ups within Hussein's Ba'ath Party as suddenly-converted practitioners of democracy...

Q: Don't you think that the military and our government must know something we don't know, to be so insistent upon storming into Iraq? I mean, there's always going to be some sort of intelligence that they can't share with their civilians, and they've repeatedly said that US/UK intelligence has pretty solid evidence that Hussein is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. Shouldn't we just trust that they know what they're doing?
A: Oh, to be so young and naive... Alright, let's run with that premise for a moment, that the Bush-Blair alliance has some sort of "smoking gun" that they're not sharing with everyone else. Why, then, would they not at least share this information with the leaders of other nations? When Tony Blair was desperate to secure a second resolution from the United Nations Security Council authorizing war, why wouldn't they have played these trump cards that they claim to possess? Instead, they just sent Colin Powell in there, armed with a plagiarized doctoral thesis from 12 years ago and a bunch of photos of "mobile biological weapons units" that turned out to be water decontamination tanks, according to UN inspectors. Powell's presentation was a huge embarrassment, especially for the UK, where the opposition to Blair's pro-war stance is even greater than the opposition to Bush's in the USA. Basically, if they had the evidence, why wouldn't they use it?

The only reasonable conclusion is that the Bush administration is "bluffing," to put it mildly. They've got nothing. They're just horny for war, and when it became clear to them that the rest of the world wasn't buying the argument that Iraq is a powder keg of WMDs that pose a "direct threat" to the United States, they suddenly switched their focus. Once it was obvious that a second resolution would be defeated at the Security Council, it was withdrawn (despite Bush's claim, one week prior, that he'd call for a vote on the resolution "no matter what the whip count is, [because] we want to see people stand up and say what their opinion is about Saddam Hussein and the utility of the United Nations Security Council") and suddenly this conflict became all about the liberation of the Iraqi people! It's not about Saddam Hussein's defiance of the will of the United Nations and the world; it's about these poor people who have suffered long enough! It's up to the United States to free them, and if we have to defy the will of the United Nations and the world, so be it, for our cause is just! In fact, we'll call it "Operation Iraqi Freedom"!

Q: If I want to protest the war- er, excuse me, "Operation Iraqi Freedom"- in a monetary fashion, wouldn't I be better off giving my money to an actual charity or cause, rather than two overeducated twentysomething brats?
A: Probably so! We humbly suggest Amnesty International. Or the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (not explicitly an anti-war organization, but an important program from which our president withdrew $34 million in aid last year due to his steadfast anti-woman stance).